Goals

Global competition is now so intense that best practices soon become the norm, so even better is needed, and sooner, if customers are to keep returning to you

As Cecil Beaton, the photographer, once said: “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary”

Hence winners set aspirational long term targets – dreams that just might become reality

Such dreams might be ‘to be the leading, biggest, best, most valuable company’ or ‘to be number one or two in our chosen markets’

If you’re a small or medium sized company, you might find such targets to be fanciful, but why not aim for the stars?

The downside, as Peter Lynch of Fidelity once noted, is that “long shots almost always miss the mark” and 99% of small companies with big ambitions fail

The upside, however, is that, by the law of large numbers, a few will always win and become the next Microsoft or Glaxo – and SMEs need guys with lofty ambitions plus bags of enthusiasm and drive not only to get them up and running but also to grow fast

If, on the other hand, you’re a large company and you’ve already had substantial success, dream targets may represent only one or two more steps up – they may not even be dreams any longer, more realistic goals with short-term deadlines

Overall, dream goals are “what companies need to break out of a vicious cycle of competitive benchmarking, imitation and pursuit” according to W Chan Kim of INSEAD

You can’t copy others if you want to beat them – you have to aspire to be much better than them

Hence Asian car companies became the most efficient in the world – they had, and continue to have, aspirational targets such as ‘to take 30% of costs and more out of the system over the next two years’ – their mantra is ‘to get good, then better’

Jack Welch pushed for similar goals at GE: “We found that by reaching for what appeared to be the impossible, we often actually did the impossible; and even when we didn’t quite make it, we inevitably wound up doing much better than we would have done”